I could have asked by a PM, but unless something is actually private I think it's better to let more people into the discussion.
I was thinking about this today, about how there is a lot of interaction going on and a lot of layers. You have an environment layer, city interaction layer, city layer, blocks, buildings. Conflict at the city level. Dungeons.
That's a lot of opportunities for a lot of different roles within a larger picture, whether that is done by AI or a player. But then what is that picture.? Is this like a classic humans verses all monsters? Are the enemies human?
What is the consequence on the broader world if a dungeon crawl goes well? What is the consequence on the dungeon crawl world if a city trades its resources well? But to understand that someone would have to understand who is competing against who in general?
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What can i do/enjoy doing? I like making systems and finding cool little solutions to things. That has been the driving impetus between the 3 staged experience of an overworld, a city interaction and a dungeon interaction. All 3 are complex systems, all 3 interact with each other, and all 3 are by themselves a full experience that caters to different flavors of gamer. The city experience plays for people who like base building and wave defense, the dungeon experience is for people who like party management and inventory management, the over world ties both together while catering to the people who like exploration. That is the goal anyways. I did all this talk about originality and now im going to compare what i am doing to already established games; irony. If Banner Lord had an infinite world and allowed you to sim city its establishments while giving you mini DCSS or Hades experiences to build up your economic power while risking your troops, then that is kind of where this is going.
All of that must be tempered with what art i can produce. As a solo dev, that means i have to make all the things. And, as much as i want to be, i am not Dream Works over here, I don't have a team of coders and a team of graphic artist and a team of people to retopologize high poly models to low and bake out their normal maps. As i said before, i am a selfish boi - i want all the things; so i guess i got all the things. Therefore, what art can i make? I liek making robots. https://img.gvid.tv/i/2thNxVY3.gif - I know how to bone, skin, rig, animate a 3d model - so i should stick with 3D. I'm no good at organics, so i should not try to make a game filled with people. I cant draw, so i should not try to do big pretty pictures... so on. These failings of mine have to be considered when crafting a story. The fun thing about games and game design, what comes first? What good is a story for your video game if you dont know how to code your game, what good is knowing how to code your game if you dont have a story? A good game can survive a bad story, a bad game cannot live with even a good story. - josh strife hayes.
I have decided to concentrate on cities for now. This means that the over world, the dungeons, all the things have been put on hold. It will first be a wave defense thing that you can join in the battle with your buddies and rts/twin stick/3rd person you way though setup and building turrets and walls while wave after wave of baddies attack, culminating in a kaiju like giant monster attack. Or invert it and join the waves of attackers as they try to tear down what you buddy had built. I think that would be cool, and lay a good ground work where the rest, the over world and the dungeon interactions, can then be built up while having a product out there that people can interact with and i would feel happy with.
What story can i build out of that? Well, a robot concentric world for one, because i cant model people yet. Just spit ball'en here: After the great catastrophe known as the "Grey Wash," which devoured all organic life on Earth, a solar flare unexpectedly rebooted the planet's systems. However, the Wash's code (a grey goo nano machine weapon) was scrambled, causing it to create synthetic life forms and bizarre biomass instead of consuming everything. In this new world, robot factories have come back online, but they no longer produce soulless machines. Instead, they are infused with the personalities of humans who were uploaded or partially absorbed during the Wash.
These sentient robots, now possessing human traits and memories, find themselves in a shattered world filled with hostility. They must fight to carve out an existence amidst the chaos. While they no longer need food, they require power, and in this world, anything can be burned to fuel the city-states' furnaces.
The Grey Wash periodically spits out kaiju-like creatures, monstrous beings driven by an insatiable urge to destroy. These colossal threats, akin to natural disasters, blindly stumble towards the city-states, leaving a path of devastation in their wake. In addition to these giant creatures, raiding factions and crazed enemies constantly seek to pillage and plunder. Some of these enemies are "Old Ones," robots that survived the initial Wash and have since lost their sanity, forming zombie-like packs that roam the wasteland. Are you ready to lead your city-state to victory and uncover the mysteries of the Grey Wash? Join the battle in "Rebirth of the Iron Cities" and become a part of a new era of survival and strategy. I am not married to that title.
I think one thing you could do is play around with an entire universe of mechanics and then focus in one one to make a first title. Sort of like what both George Lucas and Tolkien did. Storyboard a lot more than ever gets delivered as a polished product.
But if you did end up making every layer sufficiently polished and the performance of one layer affected everything else you could make it battlefront like where your character can basically choose his position. If he forgoes one position to handle another an AI takes his place. Then the player makes a balanced decision between what role will solve the most problems and which one seems the most fun to play right now.
You could just do a rolling release. I think a lot of games lie to themselves and imagine they are doing an alpha-beta-final release concept and they feel forced to because the AAA and even AA studios are required to have a release day for marketing purposes. So devs think that is supposed to be an ideal that has to be mimicked for good software. It has nothing to do with development practices and everything to do with mass scale consumer marketing. But reality hits and they end up being in a perpetual alpha that becomes rolling release. And then players get mad at devs and devs get mad at themselves because of the miscommunication.
If you did rolling release you could defer making some layers even playable for a while. And then as the game develops almost entire new games unlock within the game. Like KSP you likely would raise the price as what's being offered improves.
It's giving people permission to be mad over something so arbitrary and meaningless. Just confidently say from day one the product is a finished product because it is what I have finished so far.
Plants - Right, i was thinking that maybe foliage may be the washes default regurgitation. like, its consumed all this bio mass and kept that data on hand or something, then got fried by the solar flair and started recreating broken data randomly. A lot of stuff is plants and insects, so maybe its kicking out broken versions of those mostly, but sometimes, like if enough of it gets together, it pukes up a kaiju. Kaiju come from the sea (in the movies), so maybe the sea has been replaced by the wash making it deadly like nano acid? i dunno! thats the fun part of making games! how do we explain all this crazy stuff!